Speaker 1: Now I can't stand it. This is an outrage.
Speaker 2: We've crossed over from insult to outrage.
Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
what you can do for your country. Mister Gorbichaw, tear
down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson,
Charles C. W. Cook and I'm an AI version of
James Lylax today with our guest, Lieutenant General h har
McMaster talking about global battlespace preparation. Let's have ourselves a podcast.
They say the country is on the wrong track. You've
been in office for three and a half years.
Speaker 2: And Donald Trump has been running for office, so you've
been the person holding the office.
Speaker 3: You and I both know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: You and I both know what I'm going to Actually,
what are you talking about? I agree you'll never get
bored with when we never get bored. Welcome everybody to
the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and thirteen. I'm Stephen
Hayward doing my best to be an AI bought version
of James Lilacs. Remember last week he's threatened that this
might be in our future and joining me as always
right now, Peter Robinson and Charles C. W. Cook. So
I'm gonna skip over James's provocation from last week about
whether we may all be obsolete because of Ai soon.
I actually heard a draft podcast this week and it
was terrifying at how smooth it was, and so forth. Okay, instead,
let's think a little bit about starting.
Speaker 3: How do we know you?
Speaker 2: Are you right now?
Speaker 4: That's a good question.
Speaker 1: You can see me, can't you. Of course, you've always
had a little hard to believe, Steve, All right, now,
behave yourself, Peter, let's start here. I'm starting to feel
like there is no October surprise. It's kind of groundhog week.
I mean, we had another Israeli victory on the battlefield,
we had another shaky performance, actually more than one from
Kamala Harris, and we have a whole bunch of new
polls out showing the race is still a dead heat.
There anything change this week? I mean, there are a
couple of things to bring up, but go ahead, Peas
something changed? Good? What was? What changed?
Speaker 2: There was an immensely significant event and I'm not even
kidding how it will make its way into politics when
I do not know, but the SpaceX recapture of the
Booster rocket was a staggering moment, and it did Victor
Davis Hansen. I caught fick well. I ran into Victor yesterday.
Victor got it immediately. I saw him on Laura Ingram
later that evening. The rest of the world hasn't gotten it,
and I'm not sure the rest of the world will,
but Victor got it immediately. This race, in some ways
the entire culture is now between those who want to
lecture the rest of us and those who want to build.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by the way, there's a great you know, the
great geniuses at the Babylon b One of their headlines
out this week is Nassa baffled at how Elon Musk
managed to succeed without as many gay, don binary, Muslim
dwarfs of color as they have. Yes, yes, right, And.
Speaker 2: This is the running argument that James Lilacs and I
have been having. James thinks I'm opposed to space travel
space not at all. I'm opposed to doing that on
taxpayer money. During the Cold War, you could argue that
it was an extension of the war itself, that it
was in the public interest to get to the Okay,
Elon Musk did what he did on the money of
private investors. NASA has failed to do what Elon Musk
did by squandering our money, that in any of it.
So I want to hear what you boys think of that.
Am I onto something there? Excuse me? I know I'm
onto something I wanted to see if the two of
you are clever enough to pick up on it.
Speaker 1: Well, you may have missed Charlie's fine piece about Elon
Musk a couple of days ago. So Charlie, Charlie.
Speaker 2: Writes faster than I can read, So I'm sorry. I
refuse to feel guilty about that.
Speaker 1: Charlie, give us your take on that and plug your
piece if you like.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: Well, the piece was about the myopic habit of focusing
primarily on Trump as politician rather than his genius inventor.
Speaker 4: And the problem with doing that is.
Speaker 5: That we rightly allow much less eccentricity in our politicians
than in our inventors. For example, we would not have
wanted Henry Ford to win his Senate race, but he
was nevertheless a great titan of industry.
Speaker 4: And I worry a.
Speaker 5: Little bit that by this monomon I will focus on
Elon Musk's politics. We're going to see and are seeing
an attempt to cancel him and ignore what he's doing
in industry, which is utterly extraordinary. And he is the
great genius of the era. Now, is he also a weirdo?
Is he also a cheetah on his romantic partner? Is
he also susceptible to conspiracy theories?
Speaker 4: Short?
Speaker 5: But those are probably the same instincts that have led
him to revolutionize space travel and banking and cars and
satellite internet and maybe eventually link the brain to a computer.
So my lament was that I'm seeing pieces in the
New Republic saying he's an idiot who's good at nothing.
I think the space question that Peter raises is a
fascinating one. My view of it is just that we
have now evolved past the need for any government involvement
at all. And you see this here in Florida where
at Cape Canaveral. There is an attempt underway to turn
this into a site for private enterprise, but that does
require a bit of conversion. Back in the day when
NASA was in charge and use Cape Canaveral for the
Apollo program and other launches. For example, you couldn't launch
more than one rocket from a given site at a time.
The system was set up to be centrally controlled, and
as a result, if you had person on launch Pad
A and person on launch Pad B who wanted to
launch their rockets within say, five or six hours of
each other, you couldn't do it because the pipes that
transmit the fuel were just not set up for this.
NASA being in control of the master plan and so on,
well that needs to change because the eventual plan is
to have rockets coming in and out, and a bit
like in an airport, although you have to deal with
air traffic control, you don't tell each airline when they
can do this, that or the other.
Speaker 4: You don't have a master plan, you just coordinate.
Speaker 5: So it seems to me that we are in the
midst of transmuting what was the government monopoly for good reasons,
the Cold War being one of them, into private enterprise.
And I think we're actually getting it right. I think
we're creating infrastructure to do which is going to be great.
Speaker 2: Kanessa has become as completely unnecessary, as totally outavistic as NPR.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, but you know, my father was mixed up
in both Apollo and UH and and the Gemini program
before it, and he had a company.
Speaker 3: That didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Oh I never told you the story. Well I should
have because among the things my father's company made was
the parashue release relays and timers for Apollo, and the
stage separation timers for both Gemini and Apollo, and.
Speaker 2: Congratulations, as I recall, all of that always worked.
Speaker 1: Always worked. Although you know, he's a subtext the whole
Apollo thirteen story because I didn't make the movie of
the book. But you know, engineers up all night long
running tests. How you know, we know what the what
the amperage specs are. Will it still work at a
lower amperage spec the other okay? Uh? And you know
since time, as we know from that very fine movie
about it now. One of the things that he used
to reflect on is they were in such a hurry
to get to the moon. Because I also a love
defense contracting for jet fire planes and helicopters, and he
was telling me later about it was quite a contrast
between dealing with the Pentagon and especially MacNamara's wiz kids
about developing some fire planes, including the F one to eleven,
which is really a dud, but that was one of
those genius ideas of McNamara's people. But he said in Apollo,
because Kennedy had set that date, certain, we want to
be there. You know, eight nine years from now. NASA
did not have time to bureaucratize. They were in a
hurry to get things done. And today, I mean the
kind of I won't say it cut corners in an
unsafe way, but they were in such a hurry that
you couldn't slow it down with endless review processes and bureaucracy.
And you know, they trusted the engineers to make things work.
And you know, one of them was actually I think
it was the very second Apollo mission, Apollo twelve. You know,
the the rocket takes off, it was struck by lightning
and everything went dead. And now it turned out that yo, say, excuse.
Speaker 2: Me, I can't remember. Was that shortly after or shortly
before takeoff? I remember the end right for takeoff. So
it's like a minute of takeoff, I think, because you know,
it's still within the atmosphere, but it's under Oh yeah,
it's a sending.
Speaker 1: All right. And you know they and you know these
days and they turn around, they look at all these
young twenty eight year old engineers and their ties and protectors,
and they said, no, we're good to go. Just flip
these reset things and they'll be fine. And today they
would never allow that to happen, right, I mean, it
would be immediately scrubbed and anyway. So it's a whole
different ethic then, and now forget about it. It's just
another big sludge cludge filled bureaucracy.
Speaker 2: Which is if everything we know about Elon, what comes
through again in the Isaacson biography again and again and again,
is that Elon is now the forcing function faster, faster, faster,
three people move faster. It's just, oh, by the way,
So there's another little angle of this while we're waiting
for our guest. That comes again to the Constitution of
the United States and why one feature in particular is
so glorious at the current moment, and that is federalism.
Because the California Coastal Commission, much beloved of Stephen Hayward
because it protects his view between his estate in Cambria
and the rolling hills down the Pacific, has now denied
Elon Musk permission to increase the number of takeoffs on
obviously political grounds. It is an outrage. Does Texas even
dream of doing any such thing, of course, not yet
another reason why God blesses Texas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but also why, as you say, God bless his federalism,
and why the centralization of this is a bad idea. Obviously,
when it comes to launching rockets, you can't just do
it from anywhere. You have to be on a line.
And that's why Florida, California, and Texas are the best sites.
You can't just move to Minnesota, for example. But the
sites that are eligible are now all fighting with one
another for this business. And so Florida, and I know
this because I went down and I visited it a
few years ago. Florida is desperate to be the hub,
and it's envious of Texas, and it's envious of California.
And although California seems to be shooting yourself in the
foot as usual, you are going to see this competition
between these various sites driven by eventually private enterprise, where
they say no, no, no, don't launch your rockets from Texas,
you know, come and launch them here, which is just incredible.
It's just an incredible thought relative to how NASA was
run fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: Well, one concluding comment and our guest has arrived. Peter,
I hate the Coastal Commissions.
Speaker 3: I know you do.
Speaker 1: I know it was provoking. You see, God, I wasn't
sure that people might believe you. You're so authoritative. There's
one real puzzle to me, which is the Vandenburg Air
Force Base is a federal facility, and I don't understand
how the State Coastal Commission has any legal jurisdiction over
it at all. And my counterexample to this is Berkeley,
where I have a picture somewhere of me posing by
the city limits sign where they've attached to sign saying
Berkeley a nuclear free zone. And up above me in
the picture is the Lawrence Livermore Lab where they do
weapons research and still have a working ternastic that had
never occurred to me. Of course, it's a federal facility
beyond the reach of the Berkeley City Council. So there's
something strange going on here.
Speaker 5: Steve, Just as a final point before we go to
I guess this is one of the issues I was
told that Florida was having to deal with as well,
is that you have these layers of permission that are necessary,
and they were trying to simplify it. So with Cape Canaveral.
Apparently before you could launch a rocket. I think they've
changed this. You needed permission from the military because it
was the military installation is adjacent to it. You need
permission from the FAA because it's airspace, and you needed
permission from various Florida organizations. And to try and make
it more attractive, they've been trying to rationalize that so
that it's only one institution that has to give permission.
So I imagine you need to do something similar in California
as well.
Speaker 1: Could be but it's crazy except that here would be impossible,
right christ You know, one of the things missing from
the campaign this year, it seems to me, is a
lot of talk about climate change. It's an unpopular issue
for Democrats, but you know, they're always heckoring us in
off years on our carbon footprint. But you know what's
even bigger than your carbon footprint. It's your digital footprint.
And most of us, whether we know it or not,
have a digital footprint that is the size of Bigfoot.
And so that's our next sponsor to talk about how
to safeguard your personal data from being stolen by hackers
and thieves and scavengers. And data brokers, because when you
sign up for an app or log into certain websites,
the scavengers on the internet scrape up your name, your aliases,
even your Social Security number. But we have got a
solution for you for keeping your data out of the
wrong hands, and that is from Incogni I n cog Ni.
They are your personal data defender and they help you
very effectively safeguard you from these digital preditor So what
Incogniti does is they reach out to data brokers on
your behalf and send requests that your personal data be
removed from their databases. And with a very professional hand
and very tactfully, they try to overcome any pushback they
get from the people who want to keep and sell
your data. So they provide unmatched identity protection guarding your
sensitive data and information. It might as well be in
a high security bank vault and it protects you from
potential identity theft and ensures that your personal data remains confidential.
So why delay act now? Through Incognitate your go to
solution for keeping data brokers at bay, and by the way,
recommend it to your friends and family and so to start,
visit in cognity dot com and start safeguarding your digital
life today. Here's the bonus. You can try Incognitate risk
free for thirty days with a full refund if it
doesn't meet your expectations. So take your personal data back,
reduce your bigfoot data footprint. It's in Cognity, I ncog
ni dot com backslash Ricochet, and we thank in Cognity
for being a new sponsor of this the Ricochet Podcast. Well,
let's the turn of our guest by saying that if
the Ricochet Podcast had a frequent guest program, I think
our guests, General hr McMaster would have gold level status.
General McMaster has joined us several times before. Retired lieutenant
general in the US Army, author of several fine books,
including his most recent one, At War with our Selves,
My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. General McMaster,
welcome back to the Ricochet Podcast.
Speaker 3: Hey Steve, great to be with you.
Speaker 1: So I've got a cind of a wild opening question
for you that I didn't prepare you for, and so
I'm going to make you improvise. You know, The Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists have had their famous doomsday clock since
nineteen forty seven, which is currently at ninety seconds to midnight,
starting from seven minutes to midnight originally, and it's gone
up and down some now. By the way, the primary
driver is not nuclear war as it was say in
the Cuban missile crisis. It's climate change, because of course
everything reduces to climate change. That's a setup for saying
if there were a McMaster scale for the prospect of
global war or major international conflict. And I don't know
if you want to go one to ten a to
z clock to midnight. As I look around at Russia, Ukraine,
which is increasingly tense, the Middle East obviously with Israel
and Iran and other conflicts, where on the McMaster scale
of potential worry of a widening global confrontation are we, Steve.
Speaker 3: I think we're at an eight. And I think we're
at eight because of a couple of reasons. First of all,
is this coalescing of what I would call an axis
of aggressors, and this, of course is China, Russia, Iran
and North Korea, and the degree to which they are
aiding and ambtting one another to accomplish their objectives. For China,
of course, their objective is to create an exclusionary area
of privacy across the Indo Pacific and to create new
spheres of influence internationally. For Russia and Putin's to re
establish the Russian Empire, to restore Russia to national greatness.
For Iran, it's to kick the United States out of
the Middle East as the first step in surrounding and
destroying Israel. And for North Korea, their objective is to
reunify the peninsula under the red banner. Right. So they
have different objectives, but they see their interests overlapping, and
they have a common interest in tearing down the existing
international order and creating the chaos that they need to
accomplish their objectives. The second reason, beyond the coalescing of
the aggressors, is their perception of weakness, their perception that we,
the United States and our allies and partners internationally, lack
the resolve to be able to confront that aggression. And
I think it is the perception of weakness that is
what is provocative these days.
Speaker 2: Hey, hr Peter here, I want to spend a moment
flattering you. I was listening to you at the Hoover
Institution yesterday, you know the presentation you did, And I
was in the audience, and a young VC was sitting
next to me and he said, that guy is amazing.
He was trained as a warrior, and you were. You
speak on public affairs yours, and you have become You
became a serious historian. I mean, and the warrior bit
tends to get forgotten about because because you blather so successfully.
Speaker 1: Hr.
Speaker 2: But we should note. We should note that you were
in command of one of the most important tank engagements
since the Second World War. We won't go into the details,
but the Iraqi's lost every single tank and under you,
our guys suffered not a single casualty. Anyway, you're a
pretty remarkable guy. Here's the question, my question Ukraine and Israel.
Our country seems it may be as a matter of
policy that we a lot of stalemate in Ukraine. Here's
what's happened in Ukraine. A bunch of technosavvy Ukrainian kids
have saved their country by figuring out how to use
Jerry Rigg drones to open up a naval passage along
the coast of Ukraine, so that all though Ukraine does
not have a navy, they force the Russians off so
that they can continue to ship grain. They keep the
Russians on the defensive, they prevent the Russians from advancing,
They force them to dig in. It's a lot of
our aid, it's tremendous bravery, but it's a bunch of
technosavvy kids. We have a Pentagon with a budget of
eight hundred billion dollars. The procurement process is sludge. Then
we turn to Israel. The Biden administration has spent basically
a year now telling bb Net and Yahoo and the
IDF go slowly, just tap them, don't punch them, don't
clean them out. No, no, no, And at some point
BIB and the IDF said that's enough. This is our
country we're fighting for. And they've destroyed AMAS and they've
gone in and and who knows how bad the damage.
They've reasserted the invincibility or at least the prestige of
the masade of the IDF, of their air force, and
they and they've attacked Iran. Now, I mean it's an
So on the one hand, why the heck are we
letting Zelensky run our policy? Why are we permitting BIB
to be in the position of provoking enemies to the
extent that we may have to And At the other hand,
why aren't we kissing their asses.
Speaker 3: It's a very.
Speaker 2: Strange position to be in. It's a very strange position
to be in. But what it comes down to is
we should be learning lessons from them. Isn't there something
to that?
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot to that. I think what
you can learn, you know, from the Ukrainians is that
you know, war's not the best way of settling differences,
is G. K. Chesterton observed, But it may be the
only way to ensure they're not setting for you. And
the Ukrainians understand that. So we keep trying to give
them just enough for them to defend themselves, but not
enough to really win and prevail. And of course, in war,
you know, as the Prussian philosopher work Carl von Klausot's observe,
each side tries to outdo the other. So if you're
not trying to outdo your enemy, overmatch your enemy, you
are to profound disadvantage and you see the initiative to
your enemy. So I think this has been the tension
between you know, Zelenski and the Biden administration, is that
we're meeting out that assistance. We're debating every different type
of weapon system the permissions to those use those weapon
systems in a way that would allow them to stop
the Russian onslaught with these long range missiles, for example.
But the innovation part of this is immensely important. I
think there's a recognition now that these commercially developed technologies
have a direct implication to defense and have to be
accelerated into our own arsenals. What we have seen are
these of asymmetric capabilities like first person view drones at
PV drones. But you know what, Peter, there's always a
countermeasure to everything in war. What we need to do
is accelerate those capabilities into our force, but also the countermeasures,
which in this case are different types of radars tied
to directed energy weapons systems, for example, lasers you know
that can drop things these out of the sky. Electromagnetic
warfare is quite effective against these drones, for example. But
as you mentioned, we're not agile enough. We haven't built
those capabilities into our force as quickly as we need to.
And then the other part of your question has to
do with will, our will to prevail in conflicts and
this message that we give the israelities, Hey, you need
a ceasefire. You know in Gaza you need a ceasefire
against Hesbola. How does the ceasefire make sense until Hamas
is completely destroyed, until, as we just saw in the
last forty eight hours, sind Wars killed. But also, you must.
Speaker 2: Destroying happened to a nicer guy.
Speaker 3: You have to destroy Hamas as a precursor to getting
to any kind of enduring piece. The same people who say, oh,
we need a ceizepar right now Israelis, stop pursuing the
leadership of Hamas. Then in the next sentence, oftentimes President
Biden did this recently, talked about getting on the path
to an enduring piece between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel and
the Palestinians and a two state solution. Hey, if Hamas
still has the guns in Hamas, I mean in Gaza,
and they're still in charge and in their charter they
are determined to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews,
that doesn't sound like a two state solution to me, right. So,
so there's a complete disconnect between what our political aims
are and what we are doing militarily. And again what
Klausowitz would say, it's the first duty of the statesman
not to try to try, not to try to turn
war into something alien to its nature. And what we're
doing is advocating for military strategies constraints on forces that
are inconsistent with the political objective, and then we wonder
why we're having difficulty accomplishing political objectives.
Speaker 5: I have a question relating to the eight out of
ten answer you gave Elie. I just wonder if you
can contextualize that for me historically, if we're an eight, now,
what were we Because often the doomsday clock is so
close that it becomes lost in the proximity. If we
were an eight, now, what were we twenty years ago,
forty years ago, sixty years ago?
Speaker 4: How would you how would you set that up?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would just say, like five five years ago,
for example, six years ago, we were probably you know,
I would say like at a three, you know, or
a four. And the reason is we still had a
significant amount of credibility associated with our ability to use
power effectively to deny our adversaries ability to accomplish their
objectives to the use of force. What has changed in
those years? I think certainly we should go back at
least to twenty one and the disastrous and humiliating withdrawal
from Afghanistan in twenty twenty one. I think it was
that at that moment that the Axis of Aggressors looked
at us and goes say, you know, these guys just
surrendered essentially really across two administrations to a terrorist organization,
you know, and so now's the time for us to act.
It was at that very moment that Vladimir Putin supposedly
wrote that long essay laying out what his objectives were
for Ukraine and began to marshal the forces that he
kept in place there to conduct the massive reinvasion of Ukraine.
It was at that moment that China began to become
much much more aggressive for everywhere from the Himalayan frontier
to the South China Sea to Visa vi Taiwan. And
it was during this period of time as the Biden
adminstration came in and began to supplicate to the Iranians
that they forfeited the gains associated with the Abraham Accords
and actually emboldened the Iranians to intensify their proxy wars
against the Great Satan, you know, us, and against Israel
and their Arab neighbors. It was. It's been since then.
At North Korea it has resumed testing of cruise missiles
and intercontinent pilistic missiles teared down. The reunification arch is
providing millions of artillery routes to the Russians, and now
Russians are training North Koreans in Russia for employment in Ukraine. Okay,
So I think the breakpoint, at least just in recent history,
Charles as I would say, is the disastrous withdrawal from
Afghanistan and combined with the disastrous policies of the Biden
administration in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: General, my sense of this is that in the fullness
of time, especially if there's a wider conflagration ahead of us,
we're going to look back on the Afghanistan withdrawal as
the equivalent of the Munich Agreement in nineteen thirty eight,
as a point of no return, as a fatal mistake.
And you remind us a few minutes ago that of
the time honored principle that weakness invites aggression. But there
are two kinds of weakness, and we've felt largely on
political weakness. The ineptitude of our foreign policy leaders at
the moment under the blade administration. But there's another kind
of weakness that tempts aggressors, and that's military weakness. Now,
you know, I keep reading stories and I don't have
any deep expertise or contacts that you know. Morale's bad.
We're falling short in our recruitment goals, a lot of
our equipment is in disrepair. The Navy keeps seeming to
have a lot of accidents that seemed to me would
never have happened years ago. And so again, on the
Maaster scale of worry, you know, one to ten, ten
being worse. How worried should we be about our military
readiness and preparedness?
Speaker 3: I would say, like a seven, we should be worried,
but recognize that these problems that you're laying out are
quickly reversible if we act. Now, what has happened is
you've already mentioned, is there's been a diminishment of resources
available to the military because the Biden administration budget, despite
the threats we've been talking about, actually, when adjusted for inflation,
is a real reduction in defense spending. And so we
have this bow wave of deferred modernization. It's kind of
a triple whammy as we look at it, a bow
wave of deferred modernization. We have capacity issues in our
armed forces because we've assumed for way too long that
fewer and fewer and more exquisite systems could deliver security
for US, and those exquisite systems, we now know, because
of countermeasures, are prone to catastrophic failure. We need capacity,
the size of the force matters, and we have the
recruiting issues, and I believe that we can address all
of these. On the recruiting issues in particular, though, I
think it's connected to the million with we're all from Afghanistan,
gets connected to the degree to which popular culture, cheapens
and cours ins are warrior ethos. I think it's connected
to efforts to politicize the military in both political parties,
on both political extremes. I said, should say with the
narrative that the military is extremist, right, I mean, we
know that you know that that military veterans were not
over represented as a portion of the population on the
January sixth assault on the Capitol, for example. But that
was a false narrative of the Democratic Party who tried
to label you know, the members of the military is
extremist or or like people talk about white supremacy in
the military. I'm like, what military are you talking about?
For thirty four years, our military is fundamentally intolerant of
any form of bigotry or racism or sexism. Do we
have problems with that, Yes, because people come into our
military for our society, but our culture rejects you know
that that kind of behavior and and and position. But
the second, the second part of that is that you
know this idea that the military has gone woke. The
military is not extremist. There are people who are advancing
their crazy social agendas associated with postmodernist critical theories and
the valorization of victimhood and the organization of people into
the categories of oppressor and oppressed and on a scale
of victim and oppressor. That that nonsense. There are political
appointees who are pushing that on the military, but the
military has been resistant to that. And what we need
is we need whatever administration comes in, get your hands
off the military, understand what the military is for. Re
establish the priority of being ready to fight and win wars.
That's what our service secretaries should talk about. If you
look at the Biden administration service secretary's priorities, you could
you could scratch your in and say, please, somebody remind
me again, what's the military for?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: So the standar's got to be combat readiness, combet effectors.
And the last thing I'll say is there is a
big important social dimension to this. You know, if you
teach our children that our country is not worth defending,
who the hell is going to defend you? And I
think the curriculum of self loathing in our universities, in
our secondary education is taking its toll. I really believe
that's the case, combined with the way that popular culture
and even some well meaning charities portray veterans as traumatized,
fragile human beings, and so Americans don't see the tremendous
rewards of service. Hey, being part of the team that's
committed to a mission bigger than yourself, being committed to
the matter woman next to you, willing to give everything
for them, being part of teams that really take on
the quality of a family and their commitment to one another,
and their commitment to our nation and their mission. And
the vast majority of veterans they emerge from even the
most harrowing experiences stronger, more resilient, and they go on
to make tremendous contributions in other walks of life in
our society. So I think it's this combination, you know,
of trying to politicize the military, these false narratives of
extremism or wokeism in the military. It's it's popular culture,
it's and it's the curriculum of self loathing combined, I
think with disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, so and surrender. I
don't want to self defeat in Afghanistan. So we can
overcome all this, but we need leaders to get after it.
And when you have you know, when you have members
of both political parties trying to politicize the military, whether
it's President Trump going to Area sixty at Arlington Cemetery,
you know, where our most recent wars are buried, or
whether it's President Biden going there when he announced the
withdrawal from Afghanistan thinking that that we be a positive thing.
So I just think that our political leaders are just
completely disconnected from what motivates our servicemen and women. And
that gets back to kind of this warrior ethos, right,
this covenant that binds servicemen and women warriors to each
other and should connect them to those in whose name
they fight and serve. That ethos is based on values,
you know, like their sense of honor, their sense of duty,
their willingness to self sacrifice, their courage. Right. And so
I think we have some work to do to get
you know, politicians hands off the military and the military ethos.
But we could all, I think, talk more about the
importance of service and the tremendous rewards of service.
Speaker 2: HR McMaster's new book, At War with Ourselves, My Tour
of Duty in the Trump White House.
Speaker 3: HR.
Speaker 2: You and I taped a long interview this past summer
about the book, so you know how much I admire it.
I won't go through through the whole book right now.
You're very critical of President Trump in a number of regards.
In particular, he said in motion what would become in
the Biden administration, the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He proved willing
to deal with the Taliban in a way of which
you disapproved. At the same time, you say that the
President Trump had a number of achievements in foreign policy.
The book is fascinating. It's an important historical document. At
War with Ourselves by H. R. McMaster. We are now
just over two weeks from an election. I'm not going
to ask you who you're going to vote for. But
you've served in the military, you served in the White House,
you know, Donald Trump, You've been a close observer of
the Biden administration, which of course includes Kamala Harris advice
to voters when it comes to foreign policy, when it
comes to reasserting American strength, to putting right the way
the rest of the country treats the military. How should
voters weigh these two candidates? How should voters decide which
candid well, which candidate would be best or at least
which candidate would be less bad into the defense of
this republic.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think, Peter, it goes back to
the discussion we're having and these question about where are
we on the scale of danger? You know, I think
we're on high on that scale danger because the perception
of weakness. Who's going to portray strength, Who's going to
recognize that it is the perception of weakness that's that
is that is provocative. Who's going to reverse the disastrous
policies in the Middle East, in particular the conciliatory approach
to the to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the
theocratic dictatorship there. You know, who is also going to
to recognize that, You know that Vladimir Putin is a
is a bully, a thug and a coward all at
the same time, and what folks him also is weakness.
So I think what we need is somebody who's going
to lead and somebody who is going to be seen
as having to resolve necessary to counter this aggression and
to do what we all want to do right which
is prevent these cascading crises that we've witnessed. The largest
war in Europe since World War Two, a regional war
ongoing right now. There's one of the reasons why the
scales an eight, because there are already two major wars
going on, not even to mention, you know, the growth
of Jahada's terrorist organizations. You know, there are now training camps,
terrorist training camps in fifteen Afghan provinces, very predictably, and
we have the expansion of ISIS, for example in West Africa,
as the coups and engineered in large measure by the Russians,
have led to the withdrawal of US and French forces
that were in supportive local forces there who were conducting
counter terrorism and operations. I mean, I could go on
about this, but it's going to be a president, I think,
from national security perspective who understands that these challenges to
our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with
at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. And
so I think that you know that people should try
to try to extract more substance from the candidates and
connection with what their policies would be, you know, vis
a v this, this access of aggressors, and what they
would do to secure a better future for Americans by
by preventing UH a large scale war, which I think
is a real possibility, and then also promoting American prosperity
through countering, for example, UH, Chinese economic aggression.
Speaker 5: I want h You mentioned some issues that would presumably
be altered if the president changed, which you will depending
I respective of what happens, the president's going to change.
And then you mentioned a bunch of cultural issues, for example,
the charities and NGOs, the way they depict soldiers.
Speaker 4: How don'd you think the.
Speaker 5: Panoply of issues you just raise is going to take
to fix? How long do those cultural questions take to remedy.
Is that a matter of leadership and quick turnaround or
are we looking at a decade here of change.
Speaker 3: I think it's a decade of change, you know. I think, Charles,
it's a lot easier to tear things down than to
build things up.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I look at you know, one of the this is
a military example, but I look at the disaster of
the policies associated with the Vietnam War and how they
destroyed the United States Army, you know, really put an
army on a real strain in the nineteen seventies. And
then how it took really the Reagular administration really kind
of the very end of the Carter administration, but then
the Reagan administration to address that. And then and how
it took a number of leaders in our army who
had seen the army before these destructive policies to implement
really a renaissance in the army that began with improvements
and higher standards in recruiting and education and leader education
in particular, at change in our doctrine, a modernization of
the force. And that's that's the army that emerged from
the eighties. I think one of the strongest peacetime military
is relative to adversaries in the history of the world,
you know, and that's the military that you know, Saddam
Hussein was, you know, it was stupid enough to challenge,
you know, and and and and uh ninety one go
for So I think that I think of it. I
think of it in terms of a decade long project
of rebuilding and of course not to overcorrect. Right. So
we talked about this curriculum of self loathing. You don't
want to replace that with some contrived happy view of
US history. But I think what's long, you know, with
the way that we teach history is we've just bought
into an orthodoxy of the new left. We've always had that,
right Charles and Mary Beard, you know, and the and
the William Appleman, Williams. I mean, it's always been a strain,
you know, in in in in our interpretation of history.
But it shouldn't become an orthodoxy, right And and I
think what we ought to teach our young people is yeah,
I mean, our republic has always required constant nurturing, right
we you know, we you know, are a republic though
wasn't founded to preserve slavery. It was founded, for example,
on on ideals and principles that ultimately made that criminal
institution untenable. And we should teach our children that we
fought the most destructive war in our history to emancipate
six million of our fellow Americans. But then also teach
them about the fellow of reconstruction, the rise of the
Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow and separate butt unequal.
But but then teach them about the triumph of the
civil rights movement. You know, in the end of Djora segregation,
inequality of opportunity, does the facto inequality of opportunities still
exist based on you know, maybe the zip code you're
born in. Yes, Okay, So let's get to work on that.
I think what's happened is this orthodoxy of self loathing
and you know, and critical theories, and you know, I
think it's it robs Americans of agency, and in particular,
it leaves our young people with this kind of just
toxic combination of anger and resignation. So that's going to
take time to restore. I think what we have on
our side is the younger generation. I mean, I I mean,
you know, I think it's their job as students to
be skeptical about this kind of orthodoxy that they're that
they're that you know that you know there's being forced
on them and in some in some universities and and
uh and in some curricula and secondary education as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, General, the again the title of your most
recent book, at War with Ourselves. Happily, we are not
at war with ourselves here at the Ricochet Podcast, and
we will look forward to having you back again soon.
Keep up your gold status as a Ricochet guest, and
hopefully when the McMaster's s threat meter is down from
eight to a more tolerable five. Thanks very much for
joining us, General.
Speaker 3: See, thanks, thanks to all of you. What a pleasure
to be with you.
Speaker 1: Hr thank you all right, So well, I was mentioning
at the very beginning, of course, that we had a
lot of familiar things happen over again this week. You know,
Kamela working your words, Salad shooter, you know, new deadlock polls.
One thing we didn't have is we did not have
another hurricane. So I'm assuming Charlie this means that you
are sleeping better at night right now.
Speaker 5: I am sleeping bachelor at night right now, especially because
I sleep on cozy earth sheets.
Speaker 4: Of course, he has become American.
Speaker 1: He can do, he can do ofvi seg.
Speaker 3: There we go.
Speaker 4: You see.
Speaker 5: And the great thing about these sheets is and my
wife loves them. I love them too. But if my
wife didn't love them, then that would be the end
of it. But she absolutely loves them, and so should you.
Because Cozyot's goal is to help you create a sanctuary
within your home, a refuge from the outside world's demands.
We understand at Cozy Earth the significance of finding comfort
and tranquility amid our hectic lives, and your five to
nine should consist of relaxation, rejuvenation, unwinding, and embracing a
sense of calm. Which is good because with cod the Earth,
you can transform your space into an elevated haven where
serenity and renewal intertwine effortlessly. Feel the difference was Cozy
Earth's best selling bamboo sheet set, made from one hundred
percent premium viscos from bamboo. Cozy Earth's breathable sheets are
uniquely soft, and they only get softer with every wash.
Whether it's Cozy Earth's luxury sheets, lounge wear, pajamas, or
the awesome new sock collection, I have to check that
out you get the very best with Cozy Earth, and
all Cozy Earth bedding products come with a one hundred
night sleep trial. Well that is a long sleep trial
if you're not completely in love with them after that,
which you will be return it for a full refund.
To take advantage of this offer, go to cozyearth dot com,
forward slash Ricochet and use the code Ricochet for an
exclusive discount of up to forty percent off. That's Cozy
Earth dot com, forward slash Ricochet c o z y
e A R t h dot com. And if you
do get a post purchase survey, you must to help
us out. Say you heard about Cozier from Ricochet podcast,
so they know exactly who sent you.
Speaker 1: So I want to continue with you with Charlie a
little bit. I mean, I guess we ought to get
in on the fun with Kamala Harris this week on
with Brett Barron Fox. Ah what I guess she did?
What Calmly Daddy podcast? Or was that last week? I
don't remember, but I did stumble across this article by
one Charles CW. Cook. The headline is Kamala Harris is
an idiot? Charli, I wish you wouldn't be so equivocal
and uncertain in your judgments. But I mean, what you
have to add about what we saw campbella this week
is she desperate? What's your theory of why she decided
to go on Fox? And how do you think she did?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, this piece was part of what I've referred
to as a trilogy, my verdicts being that Joe Biden
is an asshole, and Donald Trump is a lunatic, and
Kamala Harris is an idiot. I think it's important sometimes
to distill powerful or would be powerful people down to
their essence, and the essence of Harris because she's an idiot.
She doesn't know anything, she doesn't think about anything, she
doesn't have a worldview. She is not interested in politics
except in so far as it might help her gain power,
and it shows I don't quite know what's going on
with the campaign. What I do know is that they
think they're losing. It's not the same thing as losing,
but they think they're losing. And the Democrats and their
friends in the press seem to think that they're losing too.
And I suspect that the appearance on Brett Bear's show
was the product of that sense, and what we saw
on that show was predictable given that Harris, as I said,
does not have anything to her except a support for
abortion and a loathing of Donald Trump. There are two topics,
and two topics only where Harris is confident and coherent
and eloquent and forceful, and they are when discussing abortion,
and that is a good issue for the Democrats.
Speaker 4: I wish it weren't, but it is.
Speaker 5: And when pointing out that Donald Trump is a liability,
which is another good issue for the Democrats. Everything else
she fails when asked about. And the key reason for
that is that the questions that Bear asked her are unanswerable.
I don't even think she needed to be an idiot
for much of that interview to go the way did.
She just needed to have changed her mind on every
question that was put before hers in twenty nineteen. She
just needed to be a part of the Biden Harris administration.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: The two things Bear kept hammering her on were why
have you changed your mind on everything since twenty nineteen?
Speaker 4: There's no good answer to that.
Speaker 5: The answer is because I want to win, but she
can't say that, And are you the second coming of
Joe Biden, and.
Speaker 4: The answer to that is yes, but she can't say that.
Speaker 5: But she's also adopted that as her answer default because
she doesn't want to say I've changed all of my
opinions since twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: Then she can't go back to them either. So she's
in a completely untenable position.
Speaker 5: And I think that Bear, because he's very good at
his job, made that clear, except on the question of Trump,
where she has a point and she knows that she
can score some points. And although it didn't come up
in the interview so much, on abortion, where she knows
she's on a seventy to thirty winning side.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, Peter, you know, as someone who has crafted short,
memorable statements, you know, tear down some wall or something
stuff like that. I wonder if you remember when George H. W.
Bush was running for president in nineteen eighty eight. The
reason I bring us up is, you know, Kamela on
the View last week said I can't think of a
thing where I disagree with Biden, and that I have
a synapse. I haven't killed with whiskey yet. That reminded
me that at the very first I think it was
Republican debate for the eighty eight cycle. Everybody's after Vice
President Bush, right, you know, Jack Kemp was in the
field Al hag Pete DuPont, the governor of Delaware. It
was a formidable field and one of the first questions,
I wonder if you were involved with this, remember it
and helped my memory. One of the first questions. I
tried to look it up and can't find a transcript,
but I remember it pretty vividly. One of the first
questions was Vice President Bush, can you please tell us
what policies or decisions of President Reagan's that you have
disagreed with or argued against during your vice presidency, And
he very confident and asserted. Bush said, I could, but
I won't. I won't for two reasons. One is is
that it's a vice president's duty to give candid counsel
to a president. And if you start having vice presidents
to make a practice of talking publicly about what they
disagree with, he will room one a very important relationship
of confidentiality between a president and a vice president. And second,
this campaign's about the future, not about the past. And
then he course laid out a couple of his main points,
and that was the end.
Speaker 3: Of it.
Speaker 1: He never got trussed again to put daylight between himself
and President Reagan. A couple of different circumstances. But do
you remember that episode at all? Maybe you heard of that. No, No,
I wasn't by that. Why couldn't Harris campaign? And this
is their incompetence that they could have given almost exactly
the same answer, And.
Speaker 2: That's exactly correct, That is exactly correct. Of course, the
difference is that Ronald Reagan was popular, extremely popular, and
Joe Biden is not, and Bush would almost have been
able to say. And three there was no substantive difference.
But still you're exactly right. Well, we could go into this.
We won't go into it. We could go on and on.
There are answers that both of these candidates could and
should be giving, that are crisp, that are reasonable, that
would be illuminating, and that would advance their causes politically.
And for what do we have a lunatic versus and
know nothing and lunatic verses in it? They're both they
are who they are, they are who they are, and
they're missing one chance after another. By the way, so
may I ask the two of you the same question
I asked Hr and isolate it to the question of
foreign policy alone, Trump versus Harris, and what's the correct
way of weighing it? What is the correct way of
assessing it? And by the way, Steve, a side note
for you, since you and I are both in California
and our votes in California won't matter anyway, the state
is going overwhelmingly for Harris, shall we agree right now
to write in hr McMaster.
Speaker 1: I was going to suggest that, Yeah, and then we
can also you and I start the committee for hr
McMaster twenty twenty eight. Yeah, we sure, we go exactly,
But boys, how do you weigh it out? How do
you assess it? We're going to end up with one
or the other of these? How do we buy it?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 1: I don't completely agree with Charlie that Trump is a lunatic,
although I understand why he and many other people think that.
Speaker 3: But he's not crazy.
Speaker 1: But is he crazy like a fox? Well, that's what
I kind of think. But there's an advantage to having
someone that our enemies wonder about, right and that you know,
he might be crazy. He just might. He just might
level the country like he threatens to do on Twitter.
And there's some value in that now, it's got to
be credible. But you know, taking out General SULEMANI back
in twenty nineteen, that sent the message that, you know what,
he will do that kind of thing once in a while.
So that's why I think it get tips in his favor.
Charlie may disagree. I don't know.
Speaker 2: And do we have to suppose that the people he'll
surround himself with will be better?
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily suppose that, but you don't, all right, No, Charlie.
Speaker 5: My description of Trump is illinity isn't really related to
his foreign policy.
Speaker 4: I sctually agree with you on this. I think that
Trump's perception.
Speaker 5: As a crazy man probably did help while he was president,
and the way that he told probably did help as well.
I think that his behavior after he lost, and some
of the things that he said suspend the Constitution, for example,
with sheer lunacy and we're disqualifying. But in terms of
foreign policy, and I'm not a foreign policy expert, so
I want to say that upfront, this is just not
my area.
Speaker 4: I do think that there.
Speaker 5: Is still a fundamental divide, and I don't think Trump
negates this between the broad worldviews of the left and
the right, and the Republicans and the Democrats and the
sort of people who are around Harris and Trump.
Speaker 4: That creates a.
Speaker 5: Substantial difference in attitudes toward foreign policy wants candidates are
in office. And I think that difference is a belief
in the immutability of human nature. And at the risk
of getting too philosophical here, everything I see from Biden
and Harris, whether it's Israel or Iran or China, even
seems to presuppose that bad actors in the world act
badly because of the United States and its conduct, or
something that we said, or because there are fundamental injustices
that need to be remedied. And I think that by
and large Republicans believe that there are just bad people
not there, and that they have bad instincts and bad aims.
Speaker 4: Now there is a.
Speaker 5: Caveat here in that I don't think that Trump is
a stooge of Putin. I don't even think that he's
as useful to Putin as people say. And if you look,
for example, when he was president, he was the one
who sent heavy weaponry the Ukraine, which Obama didn't do.
He has not been as opposed to funding the war
in Ukraine as many think. In fact, one of the
funny things about our politics is people have pretended to
make fit their ideological priors that Trump is against funding Ukraine.
So you had the Bulwark saying, wow, he must have
been really angry with Mike Johnson, when actually he helped
Mike Johnson get that funding through. And then you had
American Greatness, for example, saying, look at all of these
traitors in Congress who passes funding without acknowledging that Trump
was among So I'm a little confused by some of
his electric on Russia, but I don't think he's, you know,
anything like as friendly toward Russia as the pressers. But
by and large, I think Trump understands that there are
bad guys out there, that the world is dangerous, that
the geopolitical interests of the United States should not be
subordinated to some sort of Berkeley thesis on hierarchies of grievance,
and that if we get a Trump administration, it's foreign
policy is going to be better as a result. And
I just think that the presidential candidates and the parties
they represent and the ideologies that they here to make
that difference really concrete, and it will manifest solf after
the election.
Speaker 2: Very nicely put, I wished, mister chairman, I wish to
associate myself with every word of Charlie's remarks.
Speaker 1: Okay, very well, nicely put. Well, let me begin drawing
us to an end with two sleeper items from from
this week, and you can grab either one of them
or neither if you like, and suggest the third one.
The first one is, you've heard a lot of chatter
and there seems to be some evidence in campaign talk
about how the whole business of transgenderism and you know, women,
men and women's sports is the sleeper issue in this campaign.
And I gather some Republican candidates for the Senator running
some very effective ads putting Democrats on the defensive. And
Brett behar brought this up with the Kambla Harris, who
tried to run away from it as fast as she could.
So there's that. I wonder if we think that that
really is a big sleeper issue, we're going to wake
up on election day or the day after and realize
it was a factor. The second one was that I
don't know if you guys saw this, but you know,
I'm on a college campus, I'm in the middle of
these academic fights. The New York Times this week ran
a very long story right on the DEI business at
the University of Michigan. And what's notable about it is
not just how savage, it is about how awful and
corrupt and ideological far left ideology. The writer says. But
the story was written by Nick Confessatory, was a pretty
left wing reporter for the Times.
Speaker 2: And indeed it was Confessional.
Speaker 1: I hope I got his name right, But I mean
the story is I kept thinking Chris Rufa could have
written this article. Astonishing piece, and you know, if you know,
there's the cliche if you've lost the New York Times.
But that's got to leave a mark, except I think
we're going to see and that story made clear that
they're digging in so hard with the whole DEI ideology
for reasons. General McMaster laid out that it's going to
be hard to root them out. But I thought that's
a remarkable thing that The New York Times would run
such a long piece like that. So those are my
two sleeper stories of the week or items of the week.
You comment on the DEI question, sure, Charlie mentioned a
moment ago the glories of federalism. And here we have
yet another example. I discovered on a recent trip to Texas,
something that I think Charlie is already well aware of,
and that is that Florida and Texas, the governors of
those two states keep an eye on each other, and
the legislatures of those two states keep an eye on
each other, and they feel competitive about who is doing
the most rigorous and sweeping job of instituting conservative policies.
We have states competing to keep taxes low, to reduce regulation,
to fighting for the aerospace industry as it is emerging
under the likes of Elon Musk. And when Ben Sas,
who's had to step down as president of Florida because
of the University of Florida because of his wife's illness.
But this past spring, Ben Sas announced that dea I
was going to be forbidden at the University of Florida,
and the way that would be handled is that DEI
officials in the university's employment would be first on the
list for new jobs as they became available. And the
Texans looked over their shoulders at what Ben Sas had
done and said, we'll see him and raise him and
the legislature made DEI illegal at state institutions, and of
course in Texas. The state institutions in particular UT dominate
higher education in Texas, and this year they are being
serious about it, hauling into the legislature for public hearings,
provosts and other officials from the UT system to make
sure that they are obeying the law. And in Michigan,
of course it's a different but oh my goodness, think
yet again, Thank goodness for federalism in this country. There's
still always some new place to go. You know, I
am I mean two quick things about that. I know
a bit about Texas story. They're actually slow in the
legislature to figure it out, but once they did, because
I know people were talking to them for two three
years now about you need to do something about this. Yes,
oh yeah, I know, faculty members, you excellent. And but
they've said, now, we're not going to be fooled by
renaming something. That's a tactic going on a lot of places.
But I do remember, you know, when I had a
long conversation about this with Governor DeSantis is a year
and a half ago, and one of things he said was,
I don't understand why redder states than Florida. The Republican
governors are not taking after their public universities. Well now
they are because I think they looked around and said,
oh yeah, he's got the right idea. So I think
that's what's going on that we have come to and
I maybe even surpassed the end of our hour. We
want to thank our new sponsors, Cozy Earth and Incognity.
I want to encourage listeners to give us a five
star review on Apple or wherever you source your podcasts
and Lee send us your comments and we'll see you
all in the common threads on Ricochet four point zero.
Bye guys, Bye bye boys.
Speaker 2: Next week I think next week, yes, yes, next week.
Speaker 3: Ricochet h
Speaker 2: Join the conversation.